Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound

Some African and Indigenous languages don’t have a specific word for “singer” or “musician”; it’s a given that anyone who breathes can dance, drum, or sing. Music not only sprang from the human brain—it has the capacity to alter the structure and functioning of the brain itself. Aniruddh Patel, a music-cognition expert at Tufts University in Medfor

our brains process words differently when they are spoken versus sung.

Changes in the outer and middle ear helped our ancestors tune in to each other’s voices like never before. Over time, their brains began to pick out distinct pitches from all the sounds around them. This floors me: the separate tones we hear in music and speech are mental perceptions—all in our heads. In nature, there’s no such thing as “middle C.”

Researchers at Harvard University’s Music Lab have discovered that babies will calm down to lullabies in any language, from Hopi to Polynesian. The soothing doesn’t come from hearing a parent’s voice or a familiar musical style. Babies are wired for rhythm and song.

When they took out the downbeat—the strong pulse that makes us tap our feet—the newborn brains could predict where it should be (just like adults in the same study). This blew me away. The ability to perceive a musical beat, observed the 2009 study, is “functional at birth.”

Only at six months old do infants use their pitch and beat perception to recognize components of language. In infant development, wrote Honing, the Dutch music-cognition specialist, “musicality precedes both music and language.”

The inability to enjoy music of any kind is so rare that brain specialists consider it a neurological condition: “Musical anhedonia” affects roughly 3 to 5 percent of us. People with this abnormality have glitches in the auditory-processing and reward systems of the brain.

Gary Tomlinson, a musicologist at Yale University, points out that a human culture devoid of music “simply doesn’t exist.”

industry got him slapped with a drug charge. Reluctant to face the